Question

Trying to restore database backup made with heroku pgbackups -tool.

I download backup by exposing url:

$ heroku pgbackups:url 'backup-name'

Created db with:

$ createdb 'dbname' -U postgres

And tried to restore from *.dump file:

$ psql -U postgres -d 'dbname' -f *.dump

I end up with following kind of syntax errors:

ERROR:  syntax error at or near "PGDMP"
...
ERROR:  invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x9d
HINT:  This error can also happen if the byte sequence does not match the encoding expected by the server, which is controlled by "client_encoding"

Ok, so this has something to do with encoding – but how I solve it?

Both config/application.rb and my postgres server has encoding set to UTF-8. database.yml has sqlite configured to it(haven’t touched on production config). Gemfile has simply:

gem 'pg'

Answer 1

I found the answer directly from the manual:

$ curl -o latest.dump `heroku pgbackups:url`

$ pg_restore --verbose --clean --no-acl --no-owner -h myhost -U myuser -d mydb latest.dump